Word Count: 25,060

 

The glass doors swung open rather easily – they must have had maintenance done the night before. The rest of the building, or at least the lobby, was entirely spotless. Walters looked forward to seeing a cheerful Reedy made joyous by the newly refurbished hospital, but it was not so. Walter asked he front desk to page Dr. Reedy, and they did so, but who came down was not the cheerful person he had been expecting, but rather the menacing man he had also, in part, been expecting. He came from inside the green double-doors with a grim appearance and a hardened expression, as if ready to rip the next person to cross him limb from limb. Walters feared him instantly, just as his interns probably did, as well as the rest of his underlings, God forbid that they give him any. He approached Walters without saying anything, and yet saying everything all at once.
 
Walters told him his findings up front. "I think you should see this," he said, and handed the lapel pin to Reedy. Reedy examined it, not finding anything immediately. "Look on the back," Walters dictated. Reedy turned the pin over and examined the back, looking at its interesting texture and the shimmering gold covering that lined the back of the mysterious object.
 
"It’s a Genome," Reedy said.
 
It couldn’t possibly be. He had spent so much time looking over it, searching its contents, adoring its craftsmanship, wondering the entire time where it came from and what its purpose was. Did it all boil down to this? The object of his complete and utter despise was in front of him; the object that would change the world a second time, under a disguise! It was unbelievable – in fact, Walters refused to believe it. He questioned Reedy’s decision with the utmost urgency.
 
"There’s no mistake," Reedy said in reply, "that this is a Genome. It’s one of the new ones. We were given a talk about it just recently, actually. You see, under this trap door you’ve created – yes, in that chip – is a small strand of DNA." Walters was finding this hard to believe, and yet Reedy continued to talk. "I know what you’re thinking, and I’ve been thinking about it, too. They got their hands on this."
 
"They" referred to the group of thieves that had infiltrated the Hospiten. "They" had been wearing the pins, or at least one of them had been. And "They" had the capability to keep their identity constantly secret – not doubt because of the new technology. This was the age that was being ushered in by American society. These thieves were only fueling the fire, giving others ideas. Walters wouldn’t stand for it. But there wasn’t must he could d to stop them – he could barely find them, let alone come in contact with one without getting knocked out again.
 
"Old man," Reedy began, "you’d best just leave this to the authorities. Eventually they’ll be found out, arrested for stealing technology, and put in the slammer. Leave it alone."
 
Walters did not want to leave it alone. As much as his inner rebel tried to fight the fact that the world was progressing forward, there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it. It was this powerless feeling that overcame him and drove him to insanity – though his sanity at its current state was still questionable – while subsequently ripping out his heart and soul, pouring his blood of views and ideas onto the floor below. That’s what Reedy had done – ripped his heart straight out of his chest like the horrible doctor he was. He spoke with Reedy, or rather, told Reedy what he intended to do. He would continue looking for the group of thieves until he could at the very least talk with one – Reedy interrupted and said this would be impossible.
 
Walters wondered what made Reedy so calm about the manner. Not long ago it was the very same person who would insult, bellow out his stubbornness to the world, and rattle the very surface of the earth in his rage. But now he was as calm as could be. It was the most peculiar transformation, and it was likely that the other staff at the hospital had taken notice. Wait, thought Walters, they couldn’t have – when Reedy had come to the front desk he had been in stormy rage. It was something about his own question, then, that seemed to calm the savage beast. Whether it was an aspect that boosted Reedy’s ego or the fact that, for the first time, he had been disproved and wished to act modest about it, Walters would never know. He would seek, but he would never discover. That seemed to be his fate all along – always searching, never finding. Except for the pin. He held a strong sense of accomplishment in that pin, even if all of the efforts turned out to be data they would have found out anyway after the release of the new Genomes.
 
The mystery around how the thieves got their hands on the Genomes, however, was still, as of yet, unsolved. Something inside Walters told him that he knew the answer already, but he didn’t want to support his own mind until it was able to be confirmed and proven. After all, the people’s lives were at stake – not their physical lives, but their metaphorical existences. These people could, as Reedy had said, be sent to jail instantaneously for life, or for at least twenty or more years. Therefore it was not in his power to assume that he could find these people so easily.
 
Not having a good amount of time, however, kept things discouraging. There was no hope to find them while the technology was still “stolen.” Even at this phase, with the mass release of the technology only days away, it could not be considered “stolen” anymore. It was released to developers, no doubt. It had probably been for a while. Perhaps the technology had never been stolen after all. If it was, surely someone would have noticed. Society was alert enough, anyway. Many people had shapeshifted themselves to make their senses more alert.
 
With that came the inevitable bombardment of questions from Reedy, many of them asking when he would decide leave. Walters would have been happy to exit this otherworldly establishment had he not been so completely curious about the technology that he had previously despised. Now it was a topic of interest. It was a topic of interest only after he had been knocked out twice and had managed to steal already stolen technology to run research on it. It was a topic of interest after forty years of work and turmoil, suffering from dear losses and boring case studies. And just now was it occurring to him how incredibly fascinating this all really was. He still felt, in his heart, that getting the procedure done was immoral, but this could not compensate for the supreme awe inspired by the new version of the technology.
 
He asked Reedy for his pin back. It was the only thing he could keep a hold onto to drive him to continue research. He would wait, he decided. He would wait and see what this new technology did to the world. He knew exactly what it would do, but wanted to know anyway. He wanted to know that, by some chance, his assumptions were wrong. They would not be wrong – every human being in America knew that they would not be wrong, for they all shares the same thought process – but he and the numerous conservatives dreamt of a world where this “re-launch” of already existing shapeshifting technology would fail. It was such a farfetched idea. The youth of America had shapeshifting lodged into their minds as a normal process, like getting one’s ears pierced (only that was now also dictated by shapeshifting – and if it wasn’t, it probably soon would be), or using a computer. It was odd, Walters thought, how things that seem silly to one generation seem commonplace and trivial to the next. He remembered when computers were the biggest thing. He knew how they had revolutionized not just North America, but the entire world. They had changed the way everything was run, and how society dictated itself. No longer were things needed to be done by hand. With this new release from the GSS, even more things would not need to be done by hand. In fact, most everything would not need to be done by hand that was meant to remain in a fixed state for a while. Actions such as typing would not be affected, but for all Walters could imagine some boy or girl out there would give themselves a few extra fingers to acquire a faster typing speed, only to abolish those fingers the next day after they had finished typing.
 
Would such be possible? Certainly not right away, but it wasn’t hard to look into the future.
 
With the pin in hand, he waved good-bye to the doctor who, upon his turning around, returned to the unearthly scrofulous appearance that had characterized his entrance. He would proceed to antagonize the lower-level more naive doctors and surgeons as he passed them by. He was in a particularly bad mood still; Walters could not determine why, and nobody else could either, but nobody really wanted to push their way into Reedy’s personal life.
 
 
At the apartment, Walters received a phone call. It was his wife, who was preparing to come home from vacation. Rotten timing, thought Walters. She was coming home earlier than expected – about a week early. That being said, she would not return for nearly another week, giving Walters some time to sort out his own things before she returned. It would all make him look saner in the end, inducing the feeling of control over his own life, although he felt that he had no control anymore. Forces such as Dr. Reedy, the thieves, his coworkers, this pin, the GSS – all of them were moving his limbs around as though he were simply a marionette. He did not particularly enjoy the feeling, the feeling that society was controlling him and not the other way around. It was the same helplessness and powerless feeling that he felt just moments ago at the hospital upon realizing that the thieves may not be using stolen technology.
 
He used this drive to his advantage. After work each day he surveyed the pedestrian road, but no longer the road itself. He entered the shops, questioning clerks as to the whereabouts of the thieves. Often the response he received was that it wasn’t his business what these people were doing or what they looked like on a given day – whether they were two-legged or six-legged, had the head of a human or a monster. Few gave him any information, but the ones that did proved to be extremely valuable. One of them was wearing a pin just like the one that Walters had found; only it was not nude, but dressed in odd custom clothing. This must have been a change made by the GSS in the final product – assuming store clerks and owners had already received them (they were being shipped out to every store that carried any type of genetic alteration product for a nominal starter’s fee) – due to opposition of a naked avatar overlaying the pin. They weren’t really pins at all, in fact. Although they could clip onto one’s shirt, they were not meant to go there. Walters saw this as the days passed and posters began to appear in windows advertising the new ATC’s and Genomes. The Genomes fit into a slot on one side of the ATC, where they provided the genetic data for the system. The fact that the pin-like point on the back of the lapel-based object came with a clip for placing on one’s clothing was for sheer convenience of travel and portability only, in case one had multiple Genomes which, in the coming months, he would probably be able to switch between at will. That, however, did not make the ATC’s any more portable than a hiking backpack filled with stones.